Lisa Tan, “Moving a Mountain”

D’Amelio Terras, New York
May 8 – June 21, 2008

D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present “Moving a Mountain”, a Front Room exhibition by artist Lisa Tan. Works on display are a result of a trip Tan made from New York to Mexico City in November 2007. Tan’s fleeting journeys often provide an impetus for her work, which attempts to poetically encapsulate where desire and melancholia meet. This trip to Mexico City, coinciding with the Day of The Dead holiday, became a quiet discovery on what the artist found to be living.

Tan pays particular attention to the properties of midnight in a foreign city, a combination she believes to produce a ripe sense of dislocation and heightened observation. At midnight in Mexico City, while she overhears (and voyeuristically listens to) her hotel neighbors, Tan studies a painting of a mountain hung in her room and thinks of her own state of being. Taking detailed notes and photographs, but unable to discard the thought of the painting of the mountain, the artist concludes the journey months later when she returns to Mexico City to leave a trace of herself that will remain in the hotel room she once occupied.

Lisa Tan lives and works in New York City. She was born in Syracuse, NY and was raised in West Texas until she moved to Los Angeles for graduate studies. Tan received an MFA from the University of Southern California. Tan has had one-person exhibitions at Andreas Grimm Gallery in Munich in 2005 and 2007, and LA><ART in Los Angeles in 2006. In addition, Tan has been included in several notable group shows at Harris Lieberman, New York, and Artists Space, New York. Tan’s work has recently been reviewed in the publications Artforum, Art Paper, and the New York Times.